Grace, and What We Have Instead

Grace is a translation, with a Greek history. It does not exist in the Torah in its Christian conception. But "Jews don't believe in grace," is absolutely false. So in answering the question, "Where is grace in the Torah," we need a better answer than simply, "It doesn't."

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Foundations of Belief · 13 minute read

Summary

English “grace” can obscure differences among chen (favor), the verb chanan (showing favor or graciousness), and chesed (steadfast kindness and loyalty). Biblical examples include favor between people, divine generosity in Shemot 33:19, and the Priestly Blessing. The discussion compares these Hebrew terms with Christian language about grace, then turns to judging favorably, patience, and relinquishing resentment as practices of generosity toward others.

The English word, "grace", carries freight. In ordinary Christian usage, grace means unmerited divine favor—the thing that cannot be earned, that arrives from outside the ledger, and that the ledger was never going to settle anyway. That is a coherent and serious idea. It is also a specific one, with a specific history, and it is not the meaning of any single Hebrew word.

The bridge was built in Alexandria. When the Septuagint translators reached the Hebrew chen, they reached for charis—a perfectly reasonable choice, since both words cover favor, goodwill, and the quality of being pleasing. Charis then had a long career in Greek, acquired a technical sense in Paul, acquired another in Augustine, and came into English as grace carrying all of it. Centuries of Latin theology later, readers opened their English Bibles, found "grace" in Bereishit, and quite understandably assumed the doctrine had been there from the first.

It had not. The word had. The doctrine arrived by a different road, and on the way back it does not fit through the door it came out of.

Chen, or: found favor in the eyes of

Start with the word the Septuagint actually translated. Chen (חֵן), from the root ח־נ־ן, appears in the Torah some two dozen times. Notice what it is almost always doing.

It is sitting inside an idiom: matza chen b'einei—found favor in the eyes of. Abraham says it to his visitors. Lot says it to the angels. Jacob says it to Esau, twice, and Shechem says it to Jacob's sons, and Joseph says it to Pharaoh's household, and the Reubenites say it to Moshe. It is the ordinary social lubricant of the book: if I have found favor in your eyes, then—and whatever the speaker wants follows the then.

What chen describes, in other words, is an effect a person has on someone else. Appeal. Charm. The quality of landing well. Modern Hebrew kept this sense intact: chen is still charm or attractiveness, and matza chen b'einei remains an ordinary way of saying that someone or something was pleasing. Which is not where most theological vocabulary ends up.

Two early occurrences break the human-to-human pattern, and they are the two everyone remembers.

The first is Bereishit 6:8: v'Noach matza chen b'einei Adonai. Noach found favor in the eyes of God. Note the placement—this comes before verse 9 tells us he was a righteous man. The text gives us the favor first and the merit second, which is either a pointed sequence or a very fortunate accident, and the commentators have been arguing about which for a long time.

The second is Bereishit 39:21, where God gives Joseph chen in the eyes of the prison warden. That is the hinge. Chen here is not something Joseph has; it is something done to him. The same construction recurs in Egypt, where Israel is given chen in Egyptian eyes and walks out with the silver (Shemot 3:21, 11:3, 12:36).

The densest cluster in the Torah belongs to Moshe's exchange with God, where the phrase appears five times in six verses as he argues about whether the Presence will go up with the people (Shemot 33:12–17). And the coldest use is in the divorce clause at Devarim 24:1, where a wife does not find chen in her husband's eyes. Grace, that is not.

Chanan, where the unearned part lives

If you want the Torah's nearest thing to grace in the theological sense, stop looking at the noun and look at the verb.

Chanan (חנן) means to be gracious, to show favor, to grant something the recipient had no claim on. And at Shemot 33:19 it produces one of the strangest sentences in the Torah: v'chanoti et asher achon—"I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious." It is deliberately tautological. It explains nothing, because explanation would imply a criterion, and a criterion is exactly what is being refused. The favor is sovereign and unconditioned. This is the verse Paul quotes in Romans 9 to anchor his whole argument about election, and he is not misreading it; he is reading it correctly and then building something on top of it that the Torah does not build.

The adjective chanun (חַנּוּן) is reserved, in the Torah, for God alone. It appears in the Thirteen Attributes at Shemot 34:6—El rachum v'chanun, compassionate and gracious—and, more quietly and to my mind more movingly, at Shemot 22:26. A creditor has taken a poor man's cloak in pledge. Give it back before sundown, says the text, because it is all he has to sleep in, and if he cries out to Me I will hear him, ki chanun ani—for I am gracious. The attribute is not announced from a mountaintop. It is produced as the reason a blanket has to go home at night.

And then there is the one every Jew has heard out loud without necessarily parsing it. The Priestly Blessing, Bamidbar 6:25: ya'er Adonai panav eilecha vichuneka—may God's face shine upon you and be gracious to you. Same root. Daily in some communities, on Shabbat or festivals in others, and the grammar nobody stops to notice because the melody carries it.

The root also turns up in the negative, which is instructive about its range: lo t'chonem at Devarim 7:2, the command not to show favor to the seven nations—a verse with its own very large and very contested literature, and not one to wander into casually.

Chesed is not grace

The third word English collapses into the same bucket is chesed (חֶסֶד), and here the mistranslation does the most damage, because chesed is everywhere and it is load-bearing.

Translators have tried "lovingkindness," "steadfast love," "mercy," and "grace," and all of them are approximations of a word that means something English does not have a word for: faithful kindness freely shown inside a relationship. Chesed often names loyalty. It is what you owe to someone you are bound to, rendered not because it is enforceable but because the bond is real. Abraham's servant asks for it at the well (Bereishit 24:12). God extends it to the thousandth generation of those who keep the commandments (Shemot 20:6). It sits in the Thirteen Attributes as rav chesed v'emet—abundant in loyalty and truth.

Notice the difference. Chen names favor in another's eyes. Chesed often names faithful kindness within a relationship. Their meanings overlap, but they are not interchangeable, and when a translation renders both as "grace," the whole covenantal architecture of the Torah goes quietly out of focus.

The idea, without the word

Here is the part that should complicate anyone's confidence, in either direction.

The Torah's most explicit statement of unearned favor uses none of this vocabulary at all. Devarim 7:7–8: God did not set His heart on you because you were numerous—you were the smallest of peoples. And Devarim 9:4–6, more bluntly: do not say in your heart that you are getting this land because of your righteousness. You are a stiff-necked people. The land is coming anyway.

No chen there. No chanun. Just the thing itself, stated twice, in plain words, with the merit explicitly subtracted.

Which is worth saying out loud to anyone who insists Judaism is a religion of earning and Christianity a religion of receiving. The vocabulary differs. The idea that the covenant was not deserved is sitting in Devarim, unmissable, and it has been read aloud in synagogues every year since.

What we have instead

So if grace is not a Jewish category, what occupies its place?

Something rather different, and I think more demanding: not a divine disposition toward us, but a human obligation toward each other. The virtue is called dan l'chaf z'chut (דָּן לְכַף זְכוּת), and it means judging toward the scale of merit.

The image is a balance with two pans. When someone's conduct is ambiguous—and most conduct is ambiguous—you are obliged to put your thumb on the favorable pan. Not to conclude that they are innocent. To weight the scale that way while you do not yet know.

The source is Pirkei Avot 1:6, where Yehoshua ben Perachyah gives three instructions: make yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend, and vehevei dan et kol ha'adam l'chaf z'chut—judge every person toward the scale of merit. The Sages hang it on Vayikra 19:15, b'tzedek tishpot amitecha, "with righteousness shall you judge your fellow," read not as courtroom procedure but as a standing obligation on ordinary people in ordinary rooms.

Shabbat 127b makes it reciprocal, and then illustrates it with a story I find almost unbearably practical. A laborer finishes three years of work and asks to be paid. The employer says he has no money. No produce either. No land, no animals, no pillows and blankets. The laborer picks up his tools and goes home in anguish. Later the employer arrives at his door with the full wages and asks: when I told you I had nothing, what did you suspect? The laborer answers that he assumed each refusal had an innocent explanation—a bargain the man had made, a field leased, property consecrated. And every single guess turns out to have been correct.

The Talmud's point is not that charitable readings are usually right. It is that the laborer had no way to know, and chose the generous construction anyway, after three years of work, while his wages were withheld.

Patience, and giving up the right to be right

Dan l'chaf z'chut covers the benefit of the doubt. Two neighboring middot cover the patience.

Erech apayim (אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם), "long of anger," slow to wrath. It is one of the Thirteen Attributes at Shemot 34:6—which is precisely why it becomes a human obligation. The logic of imitatio Dei runs straight through the Thirteen Attributes: what God is described as being, we are instructed to become. Mishlei 16:32 makes the boast explicit, rating the slow-to-anger above the warrior and the ruler of his own spirit above the conqueror of a city.

Ma'avir al midotav (מַעֲבִיר עַל מִדּוֹתָיו), "one who passes over his own measures"—the person who declines to stand on his rights when he has been wronged. Rosh Hashanah 17a states the exchange rate: whoever passes over his measures, Heaven passes over all his transgressions. Of the three, this is the sharpest, because it does not ask you to believe the best of anyone. It asks you to let it go while knowing perfectly well that you are in the right. Anyone can be generous about an ambiguity. This one costs.

Two more sit in the same cluster. Ayin tovah (עַיִן טוֹבָה), the good eye, which Rabbi Eliezer names as the best path a person can cling to (Avot 2:9). And nosei b'ol im chavero (נוֹשֵׂא בְּעֹל עִם חֲבֵרוֹ), bearing the yoke with one's fellow, among the forty-eight ways Torah is acquired at Avot 6:6.

As for savlanut (סַבְלָנוּת)—the ordinary modern Hebrew word for patience—it is a later coinage, but the root repays a look. ס־ב־ל gives sevel, a burden: the same root as the burdens Israel carried in Egypt. Patience, in Hebrew, is a load-bearing word in the literal sense. It is not serenity. It is weight, carried.

A note on the grammar, since it will trip you

You will want to use this phrase in English, and the moment you try, something will feel wrong. Here is exactly what feels wrong.

The instinct is that dan is a verb, and that saying "be dan l'chaf z'chut" turns a verb into an adjective, which cannot be right.

The instinct is half correct and lands on the wrong conclusion. In this phrase, דָּן is not a finite verb. It is the qal active participle of the hollow root ד־י־ן (sometimes given as ד־ו־ן), and in Hebrew the participle is a genuine hybrid category—the beinoni, the "intermediate," so called precisely because it sits between the verb and the noun. It inflects like an adjective (dan, danah, danim, danot) and governs objects like a verb. So the adjectival feel you are reacting to is a real property of the word, not a misuse of it.

More to the point: "be dan" is exactly what the Mishnah does. Avot 1:6 reads vehevei dan—hevei is the imperative "be," dan is the participle. Literally: and be judging every person toward the scale of merit. An English sentence built as "be dan l'chaf z'chut" is a direct calque of the source, which on a site that publishes the Hebrew line by line is a feature rather than a liberty.

Two mechanical notes for anyone setting this in print.

First, the noun trap. If you try to slot the phrase after "give others the —," you get "give others the judging favorably," which is not English. The noun you actually want is kaf z'chut, the scale of merit itself. And note the consonant shift when you extract it: inside the Mishnaic phrase it is l'chaf z'chut, because the proclitic לְ puts a shva before the kaf and the kaf accordingly spirantizes; standing alone it is kaf z'chut, כַּף, with the dagesh restored. Pointed-text publications get this wrong constantly.

Second, agreement. Dan is masculine singular. Strictly, the participle for a woman is danah; for a group, danim, or danot for an all-female group. In English-embedded usage the phrase is frozen and nobody inflects it—which is almost certainly the right call for a field guide—but it is better to have made that choice than to be caught having not noticed it.

Where Denominations Diverge

Nothing here is denominationally contested. Dan l'chaf z'chut, erech apayim, and ma'avir al midotav are shared Mussar vocabulary across Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Renewal teaching, and the Chofetz Chaim's treatment of favorable judgment is read well outside the communities that otherwise follow him.

Where emphasis differs is in the applied literature. The Orthodox mussar tradition tends to frame dan l'chaf z'chut as a halachic obligation with defined parameters—whom it applies to, how far, and where it yields to the duty to warn. Liberal movements more often present it as an ethical disposition and a practice of interpersonal repair, frequently alongside contemporary language of assuming positive intent. Both readings are at home in the sources.

Sources Cited in the Article

Torah: Bereishit 6:8 (Noach found chen); Bereishit 24:12 (chesed at the well); Bereishit 39:21 (chen given to Yosef); Shemot 3:21, 11:3, 12:36 (chen in Egyptian eyes); Shemot 20:6 (chesed to thousands); Shemot 22:26 (ki chanun ani); Shemot 33:12–17 (five uses in Moshe's exchange with God); Shemot 33:19 (v'chanoti et asher achon); Shemot 34:6 (the Thirteen Attributes); Vayikra 19:15 (b'tzedek tishpot amitecha); Bamidbar 6:25 (vichuneka, the Priestly Blessing); Devarim 7:2 (lo t'chonem); Devarim 7:7–8 and 9:4–6 (chosen without merit); Devarim 24:1 (chen in the divorce clause).

Mishnah: Pirkei Avot 1:6 (vehevei dan et kol ha'adam l'chaf z'chut); Avot 2:9 (ayin tovah); Avot 6:6 (nosei b'ol im chavero).

Talmud: Shabbat 127b (favorable judgment reciprocated; the story of the unpaid laborer); Rosh Hashanah 17a (ma'avir al midotav).

Ketuvim: Mishlei 16:32 (slow to anger above the mighty).

Septuagint, Bereishit 6:8 and following (chen rendered as charis). Romans 9:15, quoting Shemot 33:19.